During a global pandemic, with millions of lives lost\u2014and with those losses often shamefully minimized in the popular press on the basis of age\u2014the work of age studies scholars proves itself once again so crucially needed. Thus far, age (particularly youth and old age) has structured popular conversations about COVID-19 far more often than class or race, with intersectionality in those categories of identity proving difficult to communicate to a wider public. It\u2019s not yet entirely clear whether the pandemic emphasis on age (in coverage on everything from fatalities to vaccinations) has been entirely well placed. What is clear is that this framing based on age has given scholars in our still-emerging interdisciplinary field an opportunity to join wider conversations. It\u2019s one that we ought not let go to waste. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s true that scholarship about the nineteenth century may not seem as needed or relevant as it did in the \u201cbefore times,\u201d before the pandemic. In an era of crisis, the present and the future may seem more worthy of attention than the supposedly well-grasped past. But the fact is that the nineteenth-century texts that even those of us who have been trained in this period think we know are frequently made strange and new when we bring age to the fore. It\u2019s what Crossley and Culley rightly describe in their excellent introduction to this special issue of Age, Culture, Humanities<\/em> as being alive to the sense of cultural urgency of age in the long nineteenth century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The six essays in this special issue take works of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, children\u2019s literature, and art as foundational evidence for original arguments. Some of these texts are shown to have broken new ground and to have made innovation and positive changes possible where the category of age was concerned. Others quashed them. We learn in these pages that some nineteenth-century authors, critics, or readers fell in line with then-dominant cultural dictates about age and aging. Others struggled to define their lives and works against the grain. Unsurprisingly, then, the topics and problems discussed in these essays may prove uplifting or depressing by turns. All of these essays, however, have the capacity to inspire us to further research, writing, and action. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s both true and a truism that literary and cultural histories, like history more generally, are shaped by the \u201cvictors.\u201d As we know, the victorious were rarely those who belonged to marginalized groups, including the old. Famed late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century poet, Anna Seward, understood this all too well. She knew she\u2019d be judged going forward by a group of largely male tastemakers, even after she\u2019d died. Francesca Blanch-Serrat\u2019s essay on Seward is a tour de force for its exploration of the ways the then-celebrated poet and letter writer tried to ensure her continued high literary reputation with instructions about how to publish her work after her death. Seward arranged all of these papers, and made all of these plans, only to have them carried out differently and to have her attempt at a positive legacy fail. Blanch-Serrat, in calling Seward\u2019s efforts an attempt at \u201cself-canonization,\u201d does not mean to accuse the author of overrating her talents. Instead, the essay shows what Seward was up against in getting a fair hearing for her continued relevance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Blanch-Serrat charts the ways in which Seward\u2019s younger male editor Sir Walter Scott and publisher Archibald Constable thwarted Seward\u2019s carefully laid plans for posthumous publication. These men\u2019s changes to her carefully curated texts also led to negative reviews. Seward, by leaving this work in the hands of younger men who\u2019d survive her, thought she was cannily waiting for the moment in which she might finally break free of accusations of immodesty. But, as Blanch-Serrat shows, \u201cage and gender played an instrumental part in the critical dismissal of Seward\u2019s posthumous career.\u201d The ways in which literary history was, and continues to be, shaped by sexism and ageism must continue to be uncovered and told. Seward, like so many others, hasn\u2019t yet had the afterlife that her literary achievements deserve. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The nuances of age and other categories of identity in the nineteenth century must be studied together to advance our scholarship. In her essay, June Oh takes on old age and social class. She compels us to recognize that \u201canti-aging\u201d products have a long history and may even have sometime proved progressive forces in an industrializing economy. She investigates Jane Austen\u2019s Persuasion<\/em> and its mentions of an actual nineteenth-century lotion, Gowland\u2019s Lotion. Oh argues that the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British skin care industry served to create new ways for individuals to exert agency over the aging process. <\/p>\n\n\n\n We don\u2019t tend to think of commercial anti-aging products as liberatory, and they certainly weren\u2019t entirely so. What Oh\u2019s work shows us is that, in Austen\u2019s novel, products like Gowland\u2019s Lotion fueled what she calls a movement toward the democratization of the body. Persuasion<\/em>\u2019s heroine\u2019s father, Sir Walter Elliot, is a baronet and a snob. Yet, his beliefs about the preservation and restoration of blooming skin, seen as something that might be controlled by widely available products, are surprisingly \u201cdisruptive to the existing social distinctions of class.\u201d The question that Oh\u2019s conclusion raises is the extent to which the pendulum has swung in the other direction. How, or perhaps when, do commercial treatments (whether \u201canti-aging\u201d or lifesaving) prove disruptive to, or reinforcing of, social distinctions based on class? The distance from Gowland\u2019s Lotion to today\u2019s Regeneron REGN-COV2 may seem a gulf, but tracing that shift is important as we confront anew questions of aging, curative products, and access based on class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In her article on the late Victorian fairy tales by Margaret Collier Galletti di Cadilhac, scholar Claudia Capancioni asks us to consider the process of growing up as a question of life geography and national geography. She does so through an analysis of Collier\u2019s Prince Peerless: A Fairy Folk Story Book<\/em> (1886). Capancioni\u2019s reading considers how intercultural encounters might be productively compared to the visiting of fairylands, especially those encounters that go beyond national borders. Capancioni\u2019s argument that Collier\u2019s fairy tales serve as an \u201cessential interlocutor for children to grow up understanding the value of being other, of cultural differences, interaction, and negotiation\u201d seems just as pressing now as it did 150 years ago. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Today\u2019s transnational tales of growing up may be explored through reflecting on the work of trailblazers like Collier. Her example ought to have all of us thinking differently about YouTube, TikTok, and other spaces in which young adult narratives circulate widely across national boundaries. How do these spaces serve \u201cto mediate changes into adulthood that are challenging and in equal measure exciting and daunting,\u201d as Capancioni puts it? Collier\u2019s work also raises the question of whether the age of the author of transnational tales designed for young readers matters\u2014or how it matters. What might we learn from Collier\u2019s efforts, if we examine them alongside today\u2019s digital stories, which are more often constructed by \u201cauthors\u201d far closer to their viewers\/readers in age? How are these texts offering new geographies of encounter which, like Collier\u2019s fairy tales, bring with them new exciting and daunting challenges?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Similar questions arise in response to David McAllister\u2019s work on Charles Dickens and the stories and anxieties of mid-life, particularly for men. Considering the fascinating fact that Dickens himself used newly developing products to darken the color of his hair and beard in order to hide the grays, McAllister takes us through several works of Dickens\u2019s fiction to look at them with fresh eyes. His splendid readings may make today\u2019s readers wonder how this period led to the rise of the \u201csilver fox,\u201d as the graying, attractive older man has since been stereotyped. McAllister shows that gray hairs and lines on the face were a Victorian sign of declining masculine potency. In Dickens, these signs are often linked to male characters\u2019 psychological anxiety. From there, they variously point to middle age as a potentially liberatory life stage or as a period of regrettable loss. <\/p>\n\n\n\n On the day on which I first had the pleasure of reading McAllister\u2019s essay, I drove past a billboard with an attractive white man\u2019s smooth face. He had dark brown hair and close-cropped beard and a smile. His face was being used to sell Botox, although it was marketed to men on the billboard with the phrase \u201cBrotox.\u201d Injections to lessen the appearance of wrinkles are being sold as reinvigorating manliness and bonding among youth-seeking, middle-aged men. This is a fascinating corollary to the issues that McAllister\u2019s essay, and Dickens\u2019s novels, raise. McAllister points out that Dickens\u2019s fiction has the potential to help us to reimagine midlife more positively, as a stage in which new social bonds may be forged, free from \u201cthe determining and contingent circumstances of youth.\u201d The twenty-first century may yet have lessons to learn from the Victorians about masculinity and mid-life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Victorian men innovated in art by attending to women\u2019s aging, too, as Caitlin Doley shows in her essay on James Abbott McNeill Whistler\u2019s painting, Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter\u2019s Mother<\/em> (1871). Doley examines how critics have struggled over this image, calling it everything from an adoring son\u2019s homage to his mother, to an anti-sentimental image of detached reconciliation. What Doley argues is that stunningly few art critics, in studying this painting, have paid much attention to the advanced age of the sitter\u2014Whistler\u2019s mother. Her age may be acknowledged, Doley argues, but rarely studied and scrutinized. Once we do scrutinize, as Doley shows us, we see that Whistler\u2019s art from this period, and his very technique of applying paint thinly rather than thickly, arguably shifted as a result of trying to capture his mother in old age. He took this technique with him as he moved forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Doley\u2019s conclusion, that \u201cage can have a distinct impact on creative techniques and practices\u201d as well as on \u201cthe finished appearances of visual works of art\u201d is important in that it goes beyond naming the age of the painter or the sitter, to ask about the ways in which capturing old age might produce artistic innovation. We are accustomed to thinking about \u201clate style,\u201d perhaps, as controversial as that category has rightly become in artistic and literary critical analysis (McMullan and Smiles). What Doley is asking us to attend to is something different. She offers her essay as a case study to argue for expanding the ways in which we engage in \u201cclose visual analysis of artworks that interrelate with age.\u201d Age studies is all too often mistaken as limited in scope. It\u2019s said to be little more in its method than what Andrea Charise has caricatured as \u201cspot the old person\u201d (Charise xiii). Doley shows us new ways not only to spot, but to better understand the creation and meaning of, images of figures depicted in late life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The work of G. Carney and L. Hannan on G. Stanley Hall\u2019s Senescence <\/em>(1922) proves more harrowing. They bring a feminist perspective to a masculinist text, in order to reread its complicated messages. Carney and Hannan show us that Hall\u2019s Senescence<\/em> deserves to be better unpacked by critics, as it is often cited as the first major work to consider aging as a field worthy of study in its own right. They argue that Hall was attempting to write a book of scientific research, rationality, and objective reasoning, but that his book \u201cfails to convince\u201d in his \u201cpitch for a productive old age,\u201d through his use of science, the personal, and the divine. <\/p>\n\n\n\n As we learn more about the nineteenth century\u2019s pioneering studies of aging, the supposed \u201cfirst-ness\u201d of Hall\u2019sSenescence<\/em> seems likely to fall. Earlier texts, using different keywords for old age, ignited the field of age studies. These include books about longevity and even senility, some of which have been collected in the eight-volume collection, The History of Old Age in England, 1600-1800<\/em> (Botelho and Ottaway). In the Victorian era, you regularly see the use of what now may seem redundant phrases, such as \u201csenile dementia.\u201d That\u2019s because senile used merely to mean old age. It\u2019s the same sort of linguistic difference that led scholars to overstate the extent to which the Victorians invented \u201cmidlife,\u201d when, in fact, the term \u201cmiddle period\u201d was widely used across the eighteenth century and meant much the same thing (Looser). <\/p>\n\n\n\n Nevertheless, Carney and Hannan show us that Hall\u2019s book deserves scrutiny, as much for its limitations as for its supposed innovations. It is especially troubling for its gendered arguments and its rigid focus on loss, decline, and losing the will to live. For instance, Senescence <\/em>presents suicide as an acceptable solution to encountering old age. Its effects may have had a long tail. One might read Hall\u2019s arguments alongside May Sarton\u2019s pioneering novel As We Are Now<\/em>(1973). Of course, Sarton\u2019s novel cannot be accused, as Hall\u2019s should be, of endorsing the notion that \u201cthere is nothing to be achieved, enjoyed, or celebrated past the age of 40, much less past the age of 60,\u201d as Carney and Hannan put it. But Hall channeled arguments that would come to be culturally dominant and that continue to warp ideas about what the stages and transitions of late life can, or should, look like. Carney and Hannan lead us toward better questions about what it means to study, experience, and imagine old age, then and now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The past, of course, still has its lessons for us. These lessons are most clearly felt in the work that demonstrates the constructedness of age and the ways that its categories have been imagined. So much of the force of nineteenth-century age and aging, and the transformations it wrought, remains with us. Even when it doesn\u2019t, studying its contours has great value. It compels us to step back from our own time, in order to ask how we, too, may be describing age in limiting terms. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Each of these essays opens up opportunities for more and better work and, with any luck, lives that are better and more variously lived. If we wanted to use the terms that the nineteenth century itself might have invoked to express identity across the life course we\u2019d call it the cradle to the grave. That phrase itself, no doubt, deserves to be investigated and unpacked, perhaps by the very well-established and emerging scholars whose fine work is collected in this special issue. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Whatever else we might say about progress\u2014and no doubt there has been some\u2014the thorny problems of age and aging in the long nineteenth century remain with us. We see them reflected in today\u2019s newspapers, magazines, films, television, and social media. Contemporary conversations about age and aging certainly deserve study in their own right, but they also deserve to be situated in history. That\u2019s why more of us who care about age studies and about the nineteenth century ought to heed the call of editors Crossley and Culley. They ask us to consciously adopt an inclusive tone and an open, flexible consideration of age. We might do so not only in our research addressed to other scholars but in taking the next step to transform our original findings and arguments about the past into stories to share with a wider public. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" During a global pandemic, with millions of lives lost\u2014and with those losses often shamefully minimized in the popular press on…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":78,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,227],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-special-issue","byline-devoney-looser","issue-issue-5"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ageculturehumanities.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ageculturehumanities.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ageculturehumanities.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ageculturehumanities.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/78"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ageculturehumanities.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2039"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ageculturehumanities.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2039\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2040,"href":"https:\/\/ageculturehumanities.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2039\/revisions\/2040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ageculturehumanities.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ageculturehumanities.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ageculturehumanities.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}